What does a car actually cost per year to own?

The national number, and what is actually inside it

AAA’s 2025 Your Driving Costs study puts the average price of owning and operating a new vehicle at $11,577 a year, about $964.78 a month. That is the number people quote at parties, and it is a real, well-sourced average. It is also an average across a wide range of vehicles and drivers, not a prediction for your specific car, your specific insurance history, or your specific commute. Use it as a yardstick to check your own numbers against, not a bill you should expect to match to the dollar.

Where the money actually goes

Figures verified 2026-07-24. Fuel and maintenance are AAA five year, per mile averages on a new vehicle. The $11,577 total also includes categories not broken out individually here, like depreciation and finance charges.

Notice the split in how these costs behave. Insurance and registration land on you as flat annual bills, you owe roughly the same amount whether you drive 3,000 miles a year or 30,000. Fuel and maintenance move with your mileage, which is exactly why AAA reports them per mile instead of per year, drive more and both climb, drive less and both shrink.

Thinking in cost per mile versus cost per year

AAA reports these categories in two different units on purpose, and understanding why helps you use the table correctly. Fuel and maintenance are reported per mile because they are usage costs, they only happen because you drove somewhere, so the right way to estimate your own version is to multiply the per mile figure by miles you actually expect to drive. Insurance and registration are reported per year because they are ownership costs, you owe them whether the car sits in the driveway all year or gets driven across the country, so multiplying them by mileage would be the wrong move entirely. Keeping those two mental buckets separate is what turns this table from trivia into a planning tool: a driver who commutes sixty miles a day should expect fuel and maintenance to run well above someone who drives a few miles a week, while both drivers pay roughly the same for insurance and registration on a similar vehicle.

The big cost that is not on this table

Fuel, maintenance, insurance, and registration are the pieces AAA breaks out with a clean per mile or per year number, but they are not the whole story. A new car loses value every year you own it, and for most buyers that lost value is the single largest cost of ownership, larger than fuel and maintenance combined. This page will not put a dollar figure on it because AAA’s total figure does not isolate it here, but if you want the full picture, read how depreciation drives your biggest ownership cost before you assume the categories above are the entire number.

Why your number will not match the average

A national average has to flatten a lot of real variation to produce one figure, and almost nobody actually lives at the average. A few honest reasons your total will differ:

• The vehicle itself. A car with a strong reliability record and cheap, widely available parts costs less to maintain than one known for expensive repairs or scarce parts. Fuel cost depends on how efficient your specific vehicle is, how heavy it is, and how you drive it, two owners of the same model can post noticeably different fuel spending based on habits alone.
• Where you live. Insurance premiums, registration fees, and even typical repair labor rates vary by state and by city, sometimes by a lot. I will not put a number on that variation here because I do not have a regional breakdown to cite, but anyone who has shopped insurance across state lines has seen it firsthand, the same driver and the same car can price out very differently just by changing zip codes.
• How you finance it. A car bought in cash and a car financed at a high rate do not cost the same to own, even though AAA’s per mile figures do not change. Financing charges stack on top of everything in the table above.
• How you drive and maintain it. Aggressive driving burns more fuel and wears tires and brakes faster. Skipping maintenance does not save money, it usually delays a cost and makes it bigger later, a small deferred repair has a way of becoming a large one.
• Your own driving record and credit. Two people insuring the identical car can land on very different premiums based on history alone. That is a personal factor no national average can capture, and it is worth shopping actively rather than assuming your renewal quote reflects the best available price.

The financing multiplier most people forget

Of everything that pushes your personal number away from the average, financing is the one buyers think about least while shopping and feel the most afterward. The vehicle categories in AAA’s table, fuel, maintenance, insurance, registration, are largely the same whether you paid cash or took a loan. The financing decision sits on top of all of them as its own layer, and unlike the other categories, it is almost entirely something you control through your credit profile, your down payment, and the term you choose. A longer loan term can make a monthly payment look manageable while quietly increasing the total interest paid over the life of the loan, which is real ownership cost even though it never shows up in a per mile figure. Treat the financing decision with the same scrutiny you would give the vehicle choice itself, since it can move your personal total as much as anything else on this page.

What you can actually control

You cannot control AAA’s national averages, but you can control which side of them you land on. Choosing a vehicle with a track record of low repair costs, keeping up with scheduled maintenance instead of deferring it, shopping insurance annually instead of auto renewing, and financing conservatively all push your personal total below the benchmark rather than above it. None of that requires guessing at numbers nobody has given you, it just requires treating the categories in the table as levers instead of as fixed facts about your life. The owners who consistently land below the national average are rarely doing anything exotic, they are simply making deliberate choices in each of these categories instead of defaulting to whatever is easiest at the time.

Common mistakes when estimating your own number

The most frequent mistake is comparing only sticker prices between two vehicles and assuming the cheaper one to buy is the cheaper one to own, when a gap in fuel efficiency or reliability can erase that difference within a few years. The second is pricing insurance after falling in love with a specific car rather than before, a quick quote during the shopping phase can rule out a vehicle that looks affordable until the insurance bill arrives. The third is assuming a used car automatically undercuts this new vehicle benchmark across every category, it usually wins on the depreciation and financing side but can lose on maintenance and repair if the vehicle is out of warranty, which is exactly why the maintenance and repair line deserves its own realistic estimate rather than an assumption.

Using this number to plan

The most useful thing to do with $11,577 a year, or $964.78 a month, is not to memorize it, it is to build your own version of the table above using your actual insurance quote, your actual registration bill, and a realistic estimate of your mileage and fuel costs. If you are shopping for a car right now, run this exercise before you fall in love with a specific vehicle, and compare it against what the first year of owning a new car really costs, since year one carries some extra costs the steady state average does not fully capture. If you are trying to decide how much to set aside for an existing car, start with how much to budget for maintenance specifically and build outward from there.

Next steps

Pull your own insurance and registration bills, estimate your annual mileage, and build a personal version of the table above instead of relying on the national average alone. Revisit it once a year, since insurance, fuel prices, and your own driving habits all shift enough to change the total.